Thursday, 23 October 2014

Postgrad Step-by-step: Medical Checkup

I've been writing about a step-by-step guide on furthering your studies starting from applying, finding a sponsor, IELTS exam and visa. Now I want to share about doing the medical checkup.

For MARA scholarship, they require you to do a full medical checkup. The approved medical facilities that MARA will accept are any government hospitals or clinics, KPJ Hospitals and many more. You can refer here for more list.

I did the first checkup for my master at KPJ Tawakkal, Kuala Lumpur and I did again for my PhD. I love doing my checkups here because there's not a lot of people (there's hardly any), so it won't take a long time.

To do the medical checkup here, just go to the wellness center on the 6th floor. Usually, sponsors will give a form that the doctor or fellow medical officer need to fill (your name and personal info of course you fill in yourself). Medical checkup usually consist of chest X-ray, blood and urine test.

The blood and urine test must be taken here at the Laboratory. It's located just beside the wellness center.

After the phlebotomist drew your blood and you've peed in a cup, go downstairs to here and take the chest X-ray.

The process doesn't take long if there's not a lot of people. If you go very early in the morning, there will be a few others waiting. But if you come around 10am, there will be less people because it's approaching lunch hour. But there is a risk that you might not get your result on the same day if the lab is backed up.

Overall time it'll take around 30 minutes for the chest X-ray to be done and 2 hours for the lab results to come out. After which, they will call you for a preliminary check like eye test, colour blind, your height and weight. The last thing, you will need to see the doctors after they handed all the results. The doctor will check thoroughly here in Tawakkal (I can't speak for other facilities).

The cost of the medical checkup is RM236 during the last time I went there (2014).

For students who will be furthering their studies in UK, you need to apply for student visa with the UK Border Agency (UKBA) and this process require a TB test.

TB test is actually just a chest X-ray and a consultation afterwards. However, only a handful of hospitals and clinics that is certified to do this test for the UKBA which are shown below.

You also required to bring a passport photo of yourself (white background).

The fee for the TB test is RM220 at Life Care Medical Diagnostic Centre.